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Murray Sheds Britain’s Burden

This was a victory borne in tears, those Andy Murray shed a year ago into the same blades of grass. You could not even begin to comprehend how Murray finally won Wimbledon on Sunday, how he finally bore the pressure of a faded tennis empire, an entire country hoping for him to win but expecting him to fail, without those tears. It was that day in 2012 when Murray let the world see how much he cared, how much of his heart was invested in winning this. It was as if he shared his burden with the rest of us and somehow that made it lighter.

So, by Sunday, we were all along for the ride. It was an emotional test far more than a tennis one, or at least it was once it became clear Novak Djokovic was not his usual relentless self. So it would be Murray against himself, Murray against fate, Murray against a country full of people who hide their optimism behind curtains of publicly proclaimed doom.

And when he won, when sunshine pierced those curtains and the British dropped them in sudden unbridled joy, a 77-year wait for a British men’s champion ended. As Paul Hayward writes in The Telegraph, a country celebrated, but this was one man’s victory over doubt and public negativity, of years of his biggest fans declaring he would never amount to much of anything. More important, he instantly taught a generation of British children to shake off that doubt and keep striving, James Lawton writes in The Independent. Because if Andy Murray could win Wimbledon, the player everyone watched grow from a meek child into a fierce competitor under the fiercer scrutiny of the British press, as Kevin Mitchell writes in The Guardian, anything could happen. We might all roller skate on the moon.

An actual triumph was a welcome relief, too, if you felt stampeded by off-court news, mostly courtesy of the N.B.A.'s player-shuffling season. That it starred Dwight Howard made it only that much more exasperating. Yes, Howard took his traveling soap opera to Houston, where he is officially now out of excuses, writes Michael Rosenberg on SI.com. He does have a role model in how to put the outsize fuss behind him, writes Bill Reiter on Foxsports.com, although that is pretty much where all comparisons between Howard and LeBron James usually end.